7 Deaths of Maria Callas is a multi-disciplinary affair as it combines opera, live and performance art and video projections. It is the brainchild of Marina Abramović, who is known as the mother of performance art, and is currently enjoying a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts. Abramović has always felt an affinity with Maria Callas, and the suffering caused by disillusionment and dramatic love affairs that lies at the heart of many of her own works finds its...

It is highly fitting that the Royal Opera House should present George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Solomon now since its predecessor on the site, the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, hosted the first performance on 17 March 1749. At the time of its premiere the composer’s decades-long domination of the London opera scene had already come to an end, but his oratorios in English, which he had begun composing while still writing operas, were going from strength to strength. While...

Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angel, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, is based on Luis Buñuel’s classic 1962 Surrealist film. In it a group of bourgeois guests dine at the house of Edmundo, Marqués de Nobile, and his wife Lucia, only to discover that at the end of the evening that they are unable to leave the house. An undefined force is holding them in one room, and as the days wear on the people stuck there grow increasingly bestial as...

Any world premiere at one of London’s major opera houses is an exciting occasion, but Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale was especially so given that it is based on a Shakespeare play that has seldom undergone the operatic treatment. There have been around a dozen works based upon the piece, including Max Bruch’s Hermione, Carlo Emanuele di Barbieri’s Perdita, ein Wintermärchen and John Harbison’s The Winter’s Tale, but that is a paltry...

Like Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier is the story of an ageing man attempting to put himself between two young lovers. In addition, it features an older woman who is also capable of standing in the way of the couple, but who honourably chooses not to do so. Princess Marie Thérèse von Werdenberg, known as the Marschallin, enjoys a relationship with Octavian, despite the fact that she is...